The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty

By Neal Thompson

“Here is that rare thing: an untold chapter in the Kennedy saga. . .Compelling and illuminating.”—Jon Meacham

Based on genealogical breakthroughs and previously unreleased records, this is the first book to explore the inspiring story of the poor Irish refugee couple who escaped famine; created a life together in a city hostile to Irish, immigrants, and Catholics; and launched the Kennedy dynasty in America.

Their Irish ancestry was a hallmark of the Kennedys’ initial political profile, as JFK leveraged his working-class roots to connect with blue-collar voters. Today, we remember this iconic American family as the vanguard of wealth, power, and style rather than as the descendants of poor immigrants. Here at last, we meet the first American Kennedys, Patrick and Bridget, who arrived as many thousands of others did following the Great Famine—penniless and hungry. Less than a decade after their marriage in Boston, Patrick’s sudden death left Bridget to raise their children single-handedly. Her rise from housemaid to shop owner in the face of rampant poverty and discrimination kept her family intact, allowing her only son P.J. to become a successful saloon owner and businessman. P.J. went on to become the first American Kennedy elected to public office—the first of many.

Written by the grandson of an Irish immigrant couple and based on first-ever access to P.J. Kennedy’s private papers, The First Kennedys is a story of sacrifice and survival, resistance and reinvention: an American story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780358438724

Neal Thompson

Neal Thompson is the author of four critically acclaimed books, including A Curious Man: The Strange & Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not” Ripley and Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR. Thompson’s writing has appeared in Esquire, Outside, Men’s Health, and other publications. He lives in Seattle with his family.

Book preview

Map

Map by David Lindroth

Dedication

In memory of the strong Irish women

who raised and shaped me:

My grandmother, Della (née Bridget)

My sister, Maura

My aunt, Patty

My mother, Pat

And to my wife—also strong, but Italian—Mary

Epigraphs

Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this . . .

— THOMAS JEFFERSON

I was born in a place, or so it seemed

Where every inch of ground

Was a new fever or a field soaked

To its grassy roots with remembered hatreds.

— EAVAN BOLAND, SEA CHANGE

Immigrants, we get the job done.

— LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA, Hamilton

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Dedication

Epigraphs

Introduction

Prologue

Part I: Bridget the Refugee

1. Bridget’s Escape

2. Bridget at Sea

3. Bridget on the Farm

4. Bridget in the City

Part II: Bridget and Patrick

5. Bridget Goes to Work

6. Bridget Gets Married

7. Bridget the Mother

8. Bridget the Enemy

Part III: Bridget: Alone

9. Bridget the Widow

10. Bridget the Servant

11. Bridget the Hairdresser

12. Bridget the Grocer

Part IV: Bridget and P.J.

13. P.J. the Rascal

14. P.J. the Longshoreman

15. P.J. the Bartender

16. P.J. the Democrat

Part V: P.J.

17. P.J. the Legislator

18. P.J. the Senator

19. P.J. the Boss

20. P.J. the American

Epilogue: Joe and John

Family Tree

Afterword

Acknowledgments and Author’s Note

Notes and Sources

Select Bibliography

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

Praise for The First Kennedys

Books by Neal Thompson

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

John Jr.

AT SUNSET ONE muggy summer night, a small plane ascends above New Jersey.

He’d wanted to leave earlier but got delayed. Then traffic. It’s growing dark now as he and his wife and sister-in-law head north and east toward Massachusetts in his recently purchased low-wing Piper Saratoga. He isn’t trained to fly at night, though. And he isn’t medically fit, still limping on the ankle he’d injured in a paragliding crash; the cast had been removed just days ago.

It will become apparent soon enough: John F. Kennedy Jr. shouldn’t be flying at all. An hour later, nearing Cape Cod in the moonless sky and hazy air, the plane dips, dips again, then dives straight into the Atlantic. Investigators will blame spatial disorientation. Others will blame hubris, confidence bordering on a sense of invincibility.

That day in 1999, when JFK’s only son failed to arrive at his destination and his death seemed likely, my Baltimore Sun editors sent me to join the hordes of reporters who pounced on the well-to-do village of Hyannis Port to cover the story. I interviewed neighbors, relatives, the mailman. I sat through mass, where the family priest asked the unanswerable question: Why are there calamities in life? The same question had been posed at other Kennedy deaths, numerous and always newsworthy.

Walking through the historic seaside village, home of the Kennedys’ waterfront compound since the 1920s and now littered with reporters’ coffee cups, water bottles, and yesterday’s newspapers, I visited the John F. Kennedy Memorial Park and the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum. There, visitors scribbled names and condolences in a guest book, including a husband and wife from Ireland: We are saddened at this latest Kennedy tragedy.

When pieces of the plane were found off Martha’s Vineyard, I was sipping a Jameson with a bartender who cried that she felt like I just lost a family member. When they found the bodies—John, his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren—I stood behind barricades outside the family compound, which is tucked behind stone walls and white picket fences. A light rain began to fall. An American flag was lowered to half-staff. Ted Kennedy read a statement—John was a shining light in all our lives—and a week later he would eulogize his nephew, who seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family. The whole world knew his name before he did.

John-John, son of an assassinated legend, nephew of another. He seemed like a decent if privileged guy, a journalist like me. My wife used to see him in Greenwich Village, running or Rollerblading, princely-handsome. I found myself wondering: Why are we still so connected to these reckless and beautiful Kennedys? What do they represent, especially to those of us with Irish blood? What do we want from them? And why do they keep dying?

Though I’d never nursed the default Irish American deification of the flawed and famous Kennedys—America’s royal family and all that—I felt an unexpected sadness. Not so much at the apparent conclusion of Camelot but at the failed promise of a once-poor immigrant family.

Looking around at the lights and cameras, the tearful tourists trying to catch a glimpse of Ted, last of the famed sons, I also wondered, how and when and where and why did it all start? I knew the shorthand version: Joe Kennedy, the driven patriarch, the movie mogul and financier, the liquor importer and controversial ambassador who willed and bankrolled his sons to power. I also knew that Joe had lacked interest in his family’s humble past. We’re Americans now, he’d insist. But how did the Kennedys become American? And who came first?

After filing my last story, I checked out of the Cuddle and Bubble motel and drove south to my wife and toddler sons. Passing through New Jersey, state of my birth, I came within a mile of my Irish grandparents’ graves. His name was Patrick and hers was Bridget, though when she’d arrived at Ellis Island she gave the name Della. Bridget was too much of a stereotype, synonymous with poor Irish maid. Which is exactly how she began her life in America.

She’d been dead for a decade. He’d been gone more than half a century, having left her widowed and living in public housing with three kids, one of them my mother.

As I drove past on I-95 that day, leaving behind my grandparents and the grieving Kennedys and pondering the immigrant source of their story and mine, I felt something awaken.

Until then, while I rooted for Notre Dame (my father’s alma mater), identified as Irish Catholic (easy enough in a town of Quinns, McCarthys, and Murphys), and attended sixteen years of Catholic school, I hadn’t thought too deeply about my Irish roots, the Kennedys, or any of that. Having had a sister with Down syndrome, I did appreciate the family that helped create the Special Olympics, in which my sister competed. But not until JFK Jr.’s plunge into the Atlantic did something click.

That dead-Kennedy episode aroused my simmering Irishness. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, that’s when this book began.

Years later, amid the stirred-up cries to build that wall and send them back, my curiosity was reignited. I wanted to know more about the anti-immigrant low points in our history and found most of the nineteenth century packed with shameful examples: the anti-Catholic Know Nothings, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Immigration Restriction League, alongside the parallel efforts to keep Blacks enslaved and, even after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the turbulent period of Reconstruction, disenfranchised.

For much of that transformational century, the Irish were tops among America’s feared and despised outsiders, coming to take your jobs and import their crime and their freaky religion.

As the grandson of immigrants, of those hopeful outsiders who often faced disdain or worse, I also sought to find inspiration in a story about America as a welcoming nation, of and for newcomers. In revisiting the Kennedys’ origins, I’ve tried to understand how one family evolved, within a few generations, from loathsome invaders to one of the most powerful and beloved families in US history.

While plenty has been written about the twentieth-century Kennedys, none of it would have been possible without the heroic yet overlooked lives of a poor immigrant couple named Bridget and Patrick.

It all began 150 years before John Jr.’s death—in fact, just north of where he died—when his great-great-grandparents sailed into Boston Harbor, having left a country that couldn’t sustain them to start anew in a city that didn’t want them.

Prologue

Cambridge, Massachusetts—November 23, 1858

BRIDGET MURPHY KENNEDY is burying her husband today. Boston doesn’t want his Irish Catholic body in its soil, so she’ll need to leave the city, travel west to the Catholic cemetery in Cambridge. Again.

He died at home, yesterday, after a slow surrender to tuberculosis, then known as consumption, a disease that consumed the body. Patrick Kennedy was thirty-five years old.

They’d been married nine years, having found each other after their respective escapes from a starving land. They’d had five children, buried one. They’d moved often, from cramped tenement to back-alley apartment, surrounded by more people in one block than they’d see in a month back on their farms in Ireland. Their entire world was now within walking distance of the docks where they’d landed, the docks where Patrick kept working—until he couldn’t.

With no Catholic cemetery in East Boston, and only one in all of Boston, he’d have to be interred miles west at Cambridge Catholic Cemetery, one of the only local burial sites available for their kind. Protestant Boston had done what it could to contain the Irish, corral the spread of their evil popery. Preventing Irish funerals and burials had been a long-running goal of old-school Boston, whose Yanks didn’t want the Irish walking their streets, spreading their sickness, their bad manners, their religion.

It’s no easy commute to Cambridge from the island of East Boston, especially with four young kids in tow. The hours-long journey requires two water crossings. It’s a journey Bridget made three years earlier, to bury her third child, her firstborn son.

John Francis Kennedy’s brief life was hardly unique in its brevity. Irish immigrants’ kids weren’t expected to live past age five, a dismal survival rate. John had reached twenty months before an intestinal disorder known as cholera infantum, or summer diarrhea, took him—along with scores of other poor Irish kids that summer of 1855, when six in ten Boston deaths were children under the age of five. Consumption and cholera, typhus and smallpox, the fevers and diseases of the immigrant slums stalk Boston’s air and water, flaring up like hotspots in a wildfire.

Her daughters have so far beaten the odds. Mary is now seven; Joanna just four days from her sixth birthday; Margaret, three. And in Bridget’s arms is the youngest Kennedy, another son, named for his father: Patrick Joseph, ten months old. They call him P.J.

Mass was held early that day at East Boston’s Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, a new house of worship built earlier that year beside its predecessor, St. Nicholas Church, which is being converted into a school for Irish Catholic girls like Bridget’s daughters.

The pastor, James Fitton, offered a few kind words about Patrick, his work at the shipyards where he made barrels with Bridget’s cousins, including Patrick Barron, the man who had introduced them and was standing there now, grieving beside Bridget.

The death of Patrick Kennedy earned no mention in the papers. Just another dead Paddy among tens of thousands who’d been pouring into Boston—and Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, and New Orleans—over the past decade. It’s a brittle-cold Tuesday with snow in the air as they start to make their way to the graveyard. The burial is scheduled for 2 p.m. A horse-drawn hearse carries the coffin, followed by carriages with Bridget and her children, then mourners on foot, a slow procession beyond Boston’s city limits, a common sight. (Months later a train will plow through an Irish funeral procession, killing two women.)

The question has persisted for more than twenty years: where to put dead immigrants in a city that didn’t want Irish or Catholics in its soil? City officials have passed laws and statutes to prevent Catholics from burying their dead in the mostly Protestant city. The city’s lone Roman Catholic cemetery, St. Augustine Cemetery in South Boston, has been full for years. There is Bunker Hill Cemetery in nearby Charlestown, home of the infamous convent burning, whose town leaders rejected an incoming ship full of Famine Irish and generally shared the sentiments of their newspaper editor, William Whieldon: Our country is literally being overrun with the miserable, wretched, vicious, and unclean paupers of the old country. They are not only introducing their wretchedness and disease among us but, if they ever recover from these plagues, they have a worse disease, which will overspread this country, their religion.

So, not Charlestown. Cambridge it would be. The decision had in fact been made three years earlier. A day after little John’s death, Patrick had found a family plot there and paid six dollars for it, a grim investment, hoping he and Bridget wouldn’t need it again soon.

John was the first Kennedy buried in the New World, the first not to be sunk into Irish turf. As his own death neared, Patrick was perhaps comforted to know he’d be lowered into the same American ground, to rest beside his son. His wife and children watch as the dirt covers his box.

With Patrick underground, Bridget and the others retrace their steps, back to East Boston. This is not the legacy she’d dreamed of on the deck of the ship that carried her here. She’ll have to write to Patrick’s parents, his brothers and sister back in Dunganstown, and to her own family in nearby Cloonagh.

Had it all been a mistake, thinking she could start a full new life in America? She has no choice now but to return to the job she took on when she’d arrived ten years earlier. She’ll go back to serving others. A domestic. A biddy. A maid.

Her husband’s death might have marked a tipping point into a tragic descent: into a lifetime as an overworked maid, watching as her daughters became servants too, and her son an underpaid dockworker, all of them destined to die young and poor among the reviled horde of refugees.

Instead, in a remarkable display of drive and resilience, over the next decade Bridget will march from strength to strength. She’ll become a proper wage earner, an entrepreneur, and even a landlord, at a time when most women needed a husband’s permission and a special license to open a business. She’ll learn to sell things. She’ll provide other immigrants with the supplies they need: flour, tea, milk, liquor. She’ll develop skills to pass on to her son. She’ll loan him money to launch his career, which in time will make him one of the wealthiest and most influential men on the island of East Boston. And by the end of her life she’ll be recognized as a woman of many noble and charitable traits. But first, before all of this, there was the irrevocable decision to cross an ocean, to escape toward the potentially grim unknown.

Part I

Bridget the Refugee

Escape marks the first day of a refugee’s life . . . You never forget the moment you were part of a shivering horde.

—DINA NAYERI, The Ungrateful Refugee

Ten years earlier . . .

1

Bridget’s Escape

SHE STEPPED ONTO a mossy gangplank, looked back at her parents, sisters, cousins, and friends, a small herd of them. She knew she wouldn’t return. Might never see them again. But she’d made her decision, and now it was time. What’s done is done. Carrying all she owned, some food and supplies for the journey, she walked on up.

Unlike many others on board—and those on the hundreds of ships steadily draining Ireland of its stricken citizens—Bridget Murphy was not leaving home to escape starvation. The Great Irish Potato Famine, those dark years of hunger, evictions, and disease, had struck harder and deeper to the west. And though County Wexford was hardly spared, its crops often wrecked and its poorhouses always full, Bridget was no emaciated shell of a person in rags, subsisting on foraged nettles and donated grains. She was healthy and hopeful, a plucky twenty-something on the verge of a new life.

She was driven to this moment by a different kind of hunger, a craving to leave the safety of habit and family and fling herself among strangers toward a strange new land. Rather than be held down by the laws of a foreign oppressor (England), by the male-dominated norms of her peasant society, by the dour strictures of her religion, all of which had governed her life up to this point, she chose a leap into the unknown, as her great-grandson would later put it. She joined a ship full of political refugees and other risk-takers who dared to explore new frontiers.

The ship delivered her first to a port city doubled in population by flocks of Irish fugitives. Bridget’s arrival in Liverpool, a hundred miles from Wexford as the crow flies but a days-long sail across the roiling Irish Sea and down the River Mersey, was like entering a manmade Mordor, a churning and raucous place spiked by smokestacks and ship masts. A middle ground between home and her destination, a type of purgatory, gloomy and dangerous, in the land of a queen, Victoria, who’d lorded over Ireland from afar, whose lawmakers dithered as Ireland went hungry.

Three out of four Irish Famine escapees will pass through this ashy industrial metropolis, more than 300,000 of them in 1847 alone, before boarding ships for America and Canada. Unprepared for its role as a human stockyard, the clotted burg became host to typhus and cholera, to lice and rats that invaded its squalid cellars and boardinghouses, to deaths by the thousands in its hospital wards.

Once one of the world’s busiest slave-trading ports, Liverpool now traded in a new kind of human cargo. Famine victims arrived by steamer and packet ship from Cork, Wexford, New Ross, and Dublin, many looking every bit the part of the feared and reviled refugee: half naked and starving, said one witness, huddled together in a most disgraceful manner . . . covered with the dirt and filth of each other. Lives that had been full of hope were lost even before reaching Liverpool. One crowded steamer carried seventy-two dead—the captain had closed off the hatches during a storm and they’d suffocated. One little girl escaped through an opening, but her mother and five siblings perished. As one witness observed, The pigs are looked after because they have some value, but not the emigrants.

Irish potato fields had rotted into sickening wastelands, and the mass emigration that started with a surge in 1846 had, by 1847, reached a full house-on-fire, run-for-your-lives stampede. Men and women who’d never ventured beyond the next town, who rarely saw more than a hundred humans together at church or the county fair, had flooded into the cauldron of Liverpool, desperate for a ship to Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Quebec, anywhere.

After the simple life back home, hardly changed since medieval times, Bridget would have experienced a shock and a thrill at her first glimpse of Liverpool’s hulking modernity. A thousand times larger than any village she’d known, the city hummed. A center of industry and technology, it teemed with a kaleidoscope of people from other lands, speaking in strange tongues. And it forced Bridget to confront a harsh revelation: other parts of the world had progressed while Ireland languished. There was so much she’d need to learn about the modern world.

For now, she had to focus on navigating Liverpool’s dangerous lanes and staying safe for the few long days before her ship departed. Pamphlets like Guide to Emigrants Going to U.S.A. and The Female Emigrant’s Guide offered advice and warnings: how to seek lodging and food, how to buy tickets, how to avoid the sleazy ship brokers and dock runners who preyed on naive or illiterate refugees, trying to sell them expired passage tickets or fleecing them of their meager savings.

Bridget witnessed the vile conditions facing tens of thousands of her fellow Irish. They crammed together, dozens to a room, in Liverpool’s notoriously filthy subterranean dwellings, awaiting the next ship or begging for money to buy passage. The unlucky found themselves stuck in a Liverpool limbo, sick or penniless, wishing they’d stayed in Ireland. Hundreds of women were forced into prostitution.

In his semi-autobiographical 1849 novel, Redburn: His First Voyage, about a novice merchant seaman, Herman Melville described Liverpool’s streets filled with hollow-eyed men and boys, starving and mummified-looking old women, and young girls, incurably sick. Wrote Melville: It seemed hard to believe that such an array of misery could be furnished by any town in the world.

Compared to Melville’s sad yet sympathetic depiction, the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne—who lived in Liverpool, serving as US consul—was disgusted by the scene, referring to the desperate Irish as numerous as maggots in cheese. Thomas Carlyle, the revered English author and historian who’d visited Ireland and witnessed streets filled with beggars and human swinery, called the Irish of Liverpool the sorest evil this country has to strive with.

The Liverpool Mail placed the blame at Queen Victoria’s feet, acknowledging that the scum of Ireland come to Liverpool and die in thousands . . . but whose fault is that?

At the appointed hour, clutching a carryall containing her few possessions, Bridget joined the urgent crowds at the docks on the River Mersey. She walked up another gangplank, longer and steeper than the last, onto the slick passenger deck. After a frantic series of preparations—roll calls, checks for stowaways, families desperately searching the docks for last-minute arrivals—the ship lumbered down the river, the start of a dreary, dirty, deadly month at sea.

The crossing would be the boldest, riskiest thing Bridget had ever done. She had read in the papers about ships sinking, the sickness and death at sea, the odds of reaching America at all. Still, crossing an ocean seemed no more dangerous than staying on an island of putrid black fields.

Handbills at church and placards in the village had practically pushed her to make an escape. Time to admit defeat, they suggested—defeat to the English, to the Famine. Just leave. Newspaper ads—Important to Emigrants for Boston!—had listed dates of departure to Liverpool and a menu of fast-sailing Packets leaving from there to US cities.

And here she was, aboard one of those escape vessels, sailing west. She watched the land of her oppressors disappear, preferring this fragile wooden barrel and its watery arc to the life she would have faced, had she stayed in Ireland: at best, a farm wife; at worst, a victim and a statistic. Bridget, like other women, knew her country didn’t want or need her, could barely feed and keep her, could promise her only a difficult, dreary existence. Accepting this sad truth fueled her flight.

As James Joyce would later put it, in terms applicable to generations of Irish but especially refugees like Bridget, No one who has any self respect stays in Ireland. Self-respecting women escaped in greater numbers than the men, sometimes with sisters or cousins but often alone.

Many adventurous single women took advantage of the national tragedy to get out. Opportunities in mid-1800s Ireland were finite. Even without the Famine, farm life still promised tedium. Milk the cows. Feed the pigs. Sow the fields. Reap the harvest. Make the babies. Repeat and repeat. Bridget might’ve hoped to catch a good man’s eye, ideally an older son who might inherit his father’s farm. But then she’d need her parents’ help to arrange the marriage, provide a dowry. Under the best of circumstances, she’d become only a tenant farmer’s wife, tending to the hearth, the sheep, her children, and her man, the same as it had been for centuries.

But in America? In the land of freedom, whose eccentric founders had somehow managed to snub and trounce England, the enemy of Ireland? Whose revolutionaries had created a remarkable style of government called democracy—no kings or queens, lords or ladies, no ancient animosities? In this feisty and progressive country, activist women were now rallying for the right to vote and fighting slavery, agitating for workers’ rights; they could now go to college, become teachers. In fact, some schools existed just for women, and an immigrant woman would soon graduate at the top of her medical school class to become the nation’s first female MD. In a land like that, a refugee might just start over, reinvent herself, throw off her peasant cloak and customs to become someone wholly new.

Lady Jane Francesca Elgee, the fiery Irish nationalist poet (and later the mother of Oscar Wilde) who went by the pen name Speranza, taunted the British as our murderers, the spoilers of our land and described women like Bridget as Irish souls awakening. Spread your broad wings brave and proudly, she wrote. Arise, the dawn is breaking.

A generation of Bridgets chose to take a chance on a new dawn rather than wait for marriage in an ancient land run by church and queen. Many left home, wings wide, with a sense of adventure, optimism, and purpose, believing they could accomplish things in America that Ireland would surely have quashed. In Ireland, a woman was powerless, voiceless. In the United States of America, perhaps she’d find independence and a chance to speak her mind. Better to start anew, and afar.

If she could just survive the three thousand miles of open ocean.

Leaving Ireland, of course, was just the first step. As Bridget well knew.

2

Bridget at Sea

SHE WAS SQUEEZED with hundreds into a ship built for half as many. The crew allowed her out onto the top deck only during milder weather, so she spent most days below on the cramped steerage deck, stifling and dark. There, she found herself surrounded by sick and frightened strangers.

The Irish exodus had prompted the passage of new laws intended to protect the basic rights of overseas travelers. A ship was required to provide six pints of water a day per person, for drinking, washing and cooking, and a pound of food, which might consist of bread, rice, oatmeal, or perhaps just moldy biscuits; tea and sugar were doled out twice a week. For sleeping, there was a wooden bunk six feet long and less than two feet wide, which often had to be shared with another. But there was no guarantee that the crew would distribute water and food according to the requirements of the Passenger Acts. British ships were notorious for mistreating Irish passengers.

Many of Bridget’s fellow travelers had been ill even before boarding; weak from hunger, they’d become infected with disease in Liverpool. Doctors tasked with inspecting passengers were sloppy or perfunctory in their duties, and the sick could easily hide their afflictions and slip onto the vessel. At sea, conditions were ideal for the spread of every disease—stagnant air due to the lack of ventilation, vomit and diarrhea soaking into the soggy wooden planks belowdecks because there were too few privies. Crewmen’s reports described what Bridget saw for herself: bedraggled and ghastly yellow looking spectres. Some did not have enough clothing to cover themselves.

Nothing could have prepared her for the horrors of the weeks-long wintertime crossing. Confined inside by the cold, she was forced to breathe fetid air, thick with the effluvia of hundreds of unwashed refugees, the rotting dregs of their meals, and their uncollected waste. Said a farmer leaving from Liverpool: We thought we couldn’t be worse off than we were. But now to our sorrow we know the differ.

Before reaching the open ocean, the ship passed near Ireland once more. A spell of cooperative weather might’ve allowed Bridget a brief pause at the rail for one last look north toward her homeland, her final glimpse of its browns and greens. Some passengers wailed as they watched their country disappear, while others wept for joy as they rounded the southern coast of Wexford, passing Hook Head lighthouse, sliding below the yawning bays leading north to Waterford and Cork, and finally past Cape Clear Island and out to the icy North Atlantic. How must Bridget have felt at this no-turning-back moment? Given her virtual anonymity among two million evacuees and the inconsistencies and imperfections of record keeping, in which the chronicles of men overshadow those of the women, the contours of her undoubtedly difficult crossing remain maddeningly faint, lost to the stony snub of history.

Bridget was too popular a name, the most common of Irish names for women. For centuries the legend of Saint Brigid of Kildare had inspired parents to name their girls Brigid, Bridget, Brid, Bridey, and other variants, including the diminutive Biddy. Which meant that nearly every Famine ship carried its share of Bridgets and Biddies, often a dozen or more. Some passenger lists formed an alliterative poem of them: Biddy Beaman, Bridget Burke, Biddy Lawless, Bridget Briedy, Biddy Boyle. Among so many, it is hard to pinpoint the Bridget of our story, especially since her surname, Murphy, was the most common in Ireland. Also, passenger lists were notorious for gaps, misspellings, and other inaccuracies; they often omitted women entirely or listed some as just Miss or Mrs.

Despite such obstacles, chroniclers of the Kennedys have explored various theories as to which vessel transported Bridget to America. Some suggest she traveled with a couple of sisters or perhaps her parents, or both, on the Washington Irving in 1849. But there’s no record of a twenty-something Bridget Murphy (or someone with a similar name) aboard the Washington Irving, and of the Bridget Murphys who traveled to Boston in the late 1840s (some listed as Br., Brid, Brgt., or Biddy), none can be confirmed as our Bridget. Did she travel under a different family name—perhaps as Bridget Barron (her mother’s maiden name)—as many Irish were known to do? Did she sail first to another city or to Canada, and then make her way to Boston?

She might’ve taken passage on the St. Petersburg, which left Liverpool in late 1847. Among its 250-plus passengers were a Biddy Murphy and a Catharine Murphy—roughly the same age as Bridget and her sister. More likely is the Tarolinta; its manifest lists a Biddy Murphy, age twenty-four, as well as a Patrick Barron Sr. and three sons, Patrick, John, and James—possibly Bridget’s uncle and cousins on her mother’s side, with whom she would live in Boston. (Of the Tarolinta’s 199 passengers, 16 were named Bridget or Biddy.)

By the time of Bridget’s crossing, the St. Petersburg was already known as an unlucky vessel. On a journey from Boston to Liverpool, it had sprung a leak and had to make emergency port in Providence for repairs. On a mid-1847 crossing, the ship’s twenty-three-year-old captain slipped

Reviews for The First Kennedys

[tamidale · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Kennedy family has always been of interest to me, so right away I knew I wanted to read about the couple who started their family in America. I knew they were Irish, but had no idea that their ancestors lived through the famine and came to the United States with nothing but hope and determination.Initially the Irish immigrants were not welcomed in Boston. Over the years, as more and more immigrated, they changed the demographics of Boston. Along with the demographic changes, came changes in education, housing and employment opportunities that gave the immigrants a much better way of life.The Kennedy family is the perfect immigrant success story. Within three generations, they rose from poverty to great wealth and privilege. What is so amazing about this is that Bridget, the family matriarch and first young woman from the family to come from Ireland, managed to raise four children as a widow, gradually raising her earning potential as the children grew up. It truly seems she was the backbone of the family and a big reason her son Patrick was so successful.The bulk of the story focuses on Patrick, who held many titles during his adult life. He is most known for his role in politics and as a successful businessman. Patrick also embraced his Irish Catholic heritage. He was a listener and very good with people.I was impressed at the amount of information the author was able to find about Bridget during that time period, since there are so few records for women. It’s a shame there wasn’t more recorded of Bridget’s life, because she was really the person who cultivated the family’s future success. Many thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for allowing me to read an advance copy. I am happy to offer my honest review.